3 crypto exchanges are planning to hire more than 1,000 staff — but it's not going to be easy

FILE PHOTO - A monitor shows various cryptocurrencies' exchange rates against Japanese Yen including NEM coin (middle in the top) at 'nem bar', where customers can pay with NEM coins, in Tokyo
Thomson Reuters

A slew of crypto exchanges are looking to hire, with Coinbase, Kraken, and Circle preparing to double their head count in 2018.

Between them, they're looking to add around 1,250 staff.

"There is a significant shortage of people who have expertise and acumen in this space," said Mike Poutre, the chief executive of The Crypto Company, a crypto market structure firm.

If you know someone looking for a job in the crypto, tell them the exchanges are hiring en masse.

Exchanges -- the gate keepers of the crypto world where buyers and sellers come together and tokens change hands -- struggled to shepherd a niche market into the mainstream during the crypto boom of 2017.

At the end of 2017 -- when bitcoin was trading close to $20,000 -- 24-hour trading volumes across the cryptocurrency market soared as high $70 billion. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of new users jumped on the bandwagon. This precipitated countless exchange outages and even forced a handful of exchanges to close their doors to new users.

Volumes have since come back down to Earth since the beginning of 2018. Still, at around $20 billion, they are still four times higher than they were in November of last year. But the relative calmness of the market has provided a chance for crypto exchanges to take a breath and ramp up hiring.

Coinbase, Kraken, and Circle, which recently announced its acquisition of crypto exchange Poloneix, are all looking to double their headcount in 2018. Many of those positions will be in the back office, working on building out systems to fend off the type of outages that were wide-spread in 2017. Bulking up customer service teams is another priority.

"We're effectively doubling the numbers in terms of headcount, from roughly 250 to 500," Dan Romero, VP and general manager at San Francisco-based Coinbase, told Business Insider.

The company has more than 50 job posts on LinkedIn, spanning positions from compliance to tech to customer services to human resources.

It's the same story over at Kraken, another San Francisco exchange. A person familiar with the company's operations said it is on the fast track to 1,000 employees and it's prepared to add 800 people to its staff in 2018.

Sean Neville, the cofounder of Circle, told Business Insider that the company, which has under 200 employees, is set to double its head count within the year.

"There is some work to do in addressing customer support requests and technical issues," Neville said.

There's no doubt that this will be a tough feat, especially considering how rare crypto and blockchain talent is.

"There is a significant shortage of people who have expertise and acumen in this space," said Mike Poutre, the chief executive of The Crypto Company, a crypto market structure firm. "A lot of them who are well-versed in these topics are pretty financially independent."